Identifying and Connecting the Dots at the Product Conf 2017

On Monday, Line of Sight Group attended the Product Conf 2017 put on by DevJam at the History Center in St. Paul. This year’s theme was “Product Chemistry.” There were several tracks of presentations focused on product management, business-based architecture, development operations, customer experience and user-selected topics. We jumped around to take in at least one in each area. Here are a few of the key takeaways:

Beware of lies disguised as statistics

Tell better stories

Look for problems – seen and unseen

Iterative design will take many unexpected turns

Focus on fewer, not more, ideas

Apply systematic innovation techniques to find the white space

Like fire, some products are discovered vs. invented

Construct the product roadmap by looking at problems in the context of customers before designing solutions

Anthropology can lead to sound insight about true behavior vs. asking alone

It was great to get away for a day, network, and think about how and why to connect the dots in the quest to create (or discover) new products.